Hi, Tom here with this week's Circle Line
Art School video, How to Draw the
interior of the British Museum in one
point perspective, the first step is to
draw a horizontal line slightly higher
than halfway up your page, next draw a across
in the middle of this line, this will be
the vanishing point for this one point
perspective drawing, from this vanishing
point, draw two diagonal lines to the
left and then two diagonal lines to the right,
and now in between
both of the diagonal lines on the right
we need two vertical lines and then two
vertical lines on the left hand side as
well again between the two diagonal lines,
now on the right we can draw a
triangle above this rectangle that we've
got in 1- point perspective, the middle
of the triangle needs to be a little bit
towards the center vanishing point, so
it's not in the exact center, but it's a
bit towards the left,
and then we can make this the side of a
building, by drawing a series of columns
and windows in between columns,
now the British Museum has a circular
building in its core, which once was the
British Library, to draw this circular
building in 1-point perspective we can
extend these two vertical lines on
either side of our drawing, and now draw
an ellipse, which is just a circle seen
on its side on the top and the bottom of
these two vertical lines, so we've got a
sort of drum like shape in the middle of
our drawing, I find it best to draw the
full ellipse, even though we'll only be
using the front part of each of the
ellipses for our drawing,
next we can draw another facade of a building on the left,
this time the center of the
triangle of this building will be
towards the right, but again towards the
vanishing point which is in the center of the page,
for the bottom of the
columns, we can make a small curve to
show that they are three dimensional
cylinders,
now we have the front of
two buildings with a big drum like shape
in the middle of our drawing, we could
add a door to the front center of this
drum like cinder, and to do that we need
draw an under ellipse to find the curve,
the top line of the door,
at this stage we can now add more
ellipses around the circumference of
this drum like shape along the top and
bottom lines, for the top and bottom
lines the windows that go round this
cylindrical building,
I can now add two longer shapes, vertical
shapes for some exhibition banners here too,
next, if we draw a line from the
vanishing point to the far right base of
the ellipse and then another line, from
the vanishing point again, to the far left
base of the ellipse and then a
horizontal line at the back of the
ellipse and then another horizontal line
at the front of the ellipse, we've sort
of made a square which goes around the
ellipse, a circle at the base of our
drawing, now for this square in one point
perspective, if we draw two diagonal
lines, point to point, from the diagonals,
where these two diagonals meet, that will
be the center of our ellipse, and that's
very useful for this drawing because
from this center point of the ellipse we
can work out where the stairs go either
side of the cylinder,
now all of the stairs go from lines that start at the
center of the ellipse or directly above
the center of the ellipse, as the stairs
rise, so their starting point will rise
as the stairs rise, but it will always be
in the center of the ellipse,
the stairs have staggered in blocks with flat areas
in between each of the rises,
as the stairs go left and right, as they rise, we
will need to draw the curved retaining
wall that holds the stairs in place, I've
just made this a wiggly line and this
wiggly line just needs a little thin
thickness it needs a thickness but the
thickness needs to be thin, a good thin
wall around its side,
in the center of this drawing
towards the base of the drawing we could
draw a car on an exhibition stand in
front of this door, the car needs to be
very small or any object that you want
to put in this space needs to be very
small, and this will make the building
look very big! and now I'll add some
perspective lines from the vanishing
point coming forwards towards us across
the floor, so in this drawing we're using
1-point perspective, but we're also
using another point which is in the
middle of the base ellipse, to find the stairs,
this drawing is starting to look complex, but hopefully you've got this
far and can see the basic principles
behind this drawing, now use an eraser to
clean up the drawing little bit before I
add the roof,
to draw the roof, make some equal marks along the top of the highest
ellipse that we have on the cylinder shape
and now from each of these marks we can
draw a line, now these lines, the center
line will go straight up, but as they go
towards the left they sort of curve
towards left more and as they go towards
the right they go towards right more, now
we can repeat this once we've done
the first series of lines, but this time
the next lines needs to go more of an
angle towards left and then as we go
round the ellipse they continue that angle
and then we need to repeat it one last
time so we've got three series of lines,
one that starts straight up, one the goes
towards the left and then one that goes
towards the right and they curve around
as they make this incredible roof like
glass structure that the BM has in its
core, but I want to make this into a
pen drawing, so I'll go over all of the
lines again, but this time with a black pen,
once you're ready, you could add some
tiny people to this drawing, they just
need to be small blobs with evens all
their tiny heads, you could put in lots
of people, they will need to be small but
as a sort of
go up the page, as they are higher on your
piece of paper, they need to get even
smaller, because as further away, so
basically in 1-point perspective, as
something rises higher in the page, it's
further away, if it's on the ground, we
could add in some more dark tones into
the windows, I will use some guidelines,
that I've left in the banner shapes, to
make some patterns, for this drawing I used
a mechanical pencil, a black pen and
some gray mark pens for shading, you
could just use a pencil if you don't
have green marker pens for the shading
that would be fine,
and now to add the shading at the end, I will draw in
the shadow, going towards the right from
the left, with the gray pen, and then I'll
add some thin spidery shadows around a
cylindrical building in the middle of
the British Museum, I hope you find is
drawing useful, there are over 200 of my
videos on my youtube channel
Circle Line Art School, I hope you subscribe to my
youtube channel to see my drawings, my
how to draw videos, which I post every
week, keep drawing and see you next time,
you for watching, goodbye...